The photo above shows the lake that was created in 1931 by damming a stream. The roof of the South Cottage is at the bottom left corner of the photograph. The photographs in this article were taken by Dave Parker and may not be reproduced in any way without his permission; his website features many beautiful photographs of Sissinghurst Castle.
The Nicolsons bought Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, but according to Vita "It was not until 1933 that any serious planting could be undertaken, but this was perhaps as well, because during these three impatient years we had time to become familiar with the 'feel' of the place - a very important advantage which the professional garden-designer, abruptly called in. is seldom able to enjoy. A hundred times we changed our minds, but as we changed them only on paper, no harm was done and no expense incurred. Of course, we longed to start planting the hedges which were to be the skeleton of the garden, its bones, its anatomy, but had we been able to do so in those early days I am sure that we should have planted them in the wrong place."
Before the garden could be created, the Nicolsons had to clean up piles of junk left from the time that the castle had been used as a workhouse, including rusty beadsteads, broken farm tools, old sinks, and piles of sardine cans. The high points of 1930 were the discovery of part of the moat wall of the medieval manor house, buried under earth and brambles, and the creation of a lake to the south of the castle. This was accomplished by damming a stream so that it would fill two marshy hollows; these were probably pits from which clay was dug to make the bricks for the Tudor manor house.
During the 1930s, the lake played a central role in the Nicolsons lives at Sissinghurst; their sons swam there every day during the summer, and Vita wrote that, from the beginning "the lake has been a delight, revealing a whole region of wild life I had never known before: water birds, water insects, water plants, and the general peacefulness of water life." She felt that "few things are so well adapted to repair the cracked heart, the jangled temper, or the uneasy soul" as the "tranquillity of even a small piece of water at any hour of the twenty four, whether at dawn, mid-day, sunset or midnight, spring, summer, autumn or winter.
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